Flying solo in my fifties

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Like so many women, I was delighted when the creators of the Bond franchise announced that fifty-year-old Monica Bellucci was going to be a Bond ‘woman’. I wrote about it last year here. At last, I thought, Bond gets with someone his own age and everyone goes home happy.

Except in the movie, Bellucci is on screen for about five minutes, and in that time plays the best fetishised cougar stereotype known to Bond man. She is enigmatically beautiful, shrouded in black and wearing skyscraper heels at her husband’s funeral. She is instantly available for sex and draped across a bed wearing black lingerie, which interestingly doesn’t come off during the act. Bond doesn’t even ask her if she’s interested – he goes straight in for the trademark Connery zipper move, and down she goes.

Bellucci as Lucia Sciarra in Spectre

I’ve lost count of how many (mainly younger) guys want women my age to play that role. They lose interest if I don’t agree to wear the classic ‘Miss Jones’ pencil skirt and heels with appropriate lingerie. In fact one guy ran away from me because I deliberately went ‘real’, as I always do. He told me he had a thing about stepmothers.

His own, in fact.

I wouldn’t play the game.

Only the other night a young guy in a club asked me if “I was one of those cougars” and I had to explain that “no, I’m an older woman standing in a club being propositioned by a younger man.” The degree to which he wanted to me to be a predator and/or sexually available resulted in him having to be ‘forcibly removed’ from my presence by a male friend.

Virginal Lea Seydoux in Spectre

It was so disappointing to see La Bellucci cast in the same role – literally a black widow, waiting for her prey. And even more disappointing to see her replaced in Bond’s ‘affections’ by the virginal Lea Seydoux, clad in white, cream or ivory throughout the movie. Bond promises her father he will protect her, and he does in knightly fashion, even guarding her while she sleeps.

Their relationship, finally consummated, is built to last and (spoiler alert) they go off into the Spectral sunset together. Of course. OF COURSE. This is the relationship that works. It could never happen with someone Bond’s own age, who is as sexually avaricious as he is, who is his match in life-experience terms.

Further disappointment was heaped on because both women are there to simply be saved or serviced by Bond. At least Vesper Lynd had a job of her own and worked alongside Bond to defeat the enemy. Maybe Bond has got a bit sick of those train journeys where women give him an intellectual run for his money. So much easier to pick someone he can simply seduce and/or save.

Vesper Lynd grills Bond in Casino Royale

I love Bond movies and loved this one, but it would have been so good to see Bellucci give Bond a run for his money. It would have been so good to see her step out of the cinematic shadows (she is shrouded in them during her scenes) and be a real woman on screen. Instead she is cast as the real spectre of the movie.